Justin Tadlock Releases Hybrid News Theme

Just Tadlock (community member greenshady) has released a new child theme based on his theme framework ‘ThemeHybrid‘. If we were playing a drinking game which would be acceptable considering this is a tavern, you folks ought to be drunk by now. With that said, the Hybrid News theme features much of what you would expect a newsy type theme to have with a bit of Justin’s magic thrown in.

Hybrid News Theme In Action

Featured post block which is animated

Post thumbnails for articles on the front page

Four widget areas in the footer

Two right handed skinny sidebars

Featured video block

Four-level drop-down menu

A Tabber that features Hot Tags, Random Posts, and your Archives

Fully compliant with WordPress 2.7

Giving the theme a good look over from the demo which is located here, looks like Hybrid News could easily fit the bill for many of you still looking for a free, news layout type of theme. One thing I noticed which is really nice is that, the post thumbnails as well as the featured posts appear to take the first image which shows up in the post content and uses that as the thumbnail, scaling down or up in size automatically. This is a huge time saver, especially compared to the way in which I currently have to apply an image URL to a post_thumbnail custom field for it to work properly in the theme WPTavern is using.

Who is Jeff Chandler

Jeff Chandler is a WordPress guy in the buckeye state. Contributing writer for WPTavern. Have been writing about WordPress since 2007. Host of the WordPress Weekly Podcast.

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12 Comments

You asked me the other day what users wanted, if they were still into news-style themes. This theme is a direct result of loads of user input from a survey I conducted in December. I tried to find some solid middle ground where their ideas could peacefully meet mine.

I went through 11 complete redesigns of this theme before finally settling with what we have. Overall, I’m fairly happy with it.

Now, I must sleep for a few hours. When I return, I need to catch up on all the lost time from the last few days.

@Justin Tadlock – Heh, for some reason your comment ended up flagged as Spam in Akismet. Wow 11 redesigns? I wonder what those looked like compared to the final product. Looks very sharp and crisp though.

@Erwin M – I’m having the same problem and, like you, have deleted and reinstalled both plugins several times. When I visit the Theme Hybrid site I found several people posting the same problem. Unfortunately the response from the administrator was to “stop making comments unless you have something constructive to say,” and that he had “seen it working on hundreds of sites and it’s working fine.” Hmmm.

Now I understand the moderator’s response. He’s probably just tired of repsonding to comments from those of us who didn’t install the plugin correctly. As it turns out the problem was due to my own error. I had unzipped the Hybrid theme and uploaded the whole thing directly into the themes folder. I should have uploaded only the folder called “hybrid”. Justin is right, the Hybrid News works fine.